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We’ve come to turn to our media goddesses – Oprah, Martha and Rachael – for how to cook, to be empowered, even on how to arrange our bedroom pillows. Goddesses, though, must be feared, and there’s something a little intimidating about an entire magazine devoted to a personality with the power to make us feel inadequate.

It has been a rough couple of weeks for Oprah Winfrey, what with some of her saintly luster being tarnished by an alleged abuse scandal in her South African school. But we’re glad to see that her self-righteousness isn’t diminished. Look no further than her interview with Sir Richard Branson in the December issue of O, The Oprah Magazine to see what we mean. “What’s the source of your drive to contribute to the world? It feels like an extraordinary force,” Oprah asks in the first question of the piece, to which Branson replies, “If anybody knows about that force, you do!” That sound you hear is Media City trying to fight off nausea. Save for the piece titled “The Camel Library,” which revolves around a twice-monthly delivery of books via camel to people in a remote region of Somalia, we didn’t find much else readable or inspirational about the issue.

We did, however, like the issue much better than the latest offering from Martha Stewart Living, which we found only minutely more preferable to reading subway advertisements on the way to work. There aren’t many tree farms in Manhattan, so we found the piece on picking out the perfect evergreen to be utterly useless. And we only like ginger when it pertains to “Gilligan’s Island” reruns, so the article on making desserts from the spice didn’t sate our sweet tooth. We did like the back-page recipe for “Cookie of the Month” but only because it brought with it the sweet relief of finishing the magazine.

Every Day with Rachael Ray dedicates its latest issue to holiday entertaining. The package includes tips on everything from throwing a New Year’s party on a budget to selecting the best store-bought party dips to building a gingerbread house out of cereal. For those who want to get away, the mag suggests a half-dozen destinations, featuring a mix of snowy and tropical locales. It also offers ideas for creative gift-wrapping, and elsewhere warns those who want to cover every inch of their house in Christmas lights that it will cost plenty: the electric bills for some homes run as high as $2,100 for the month.

In The New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson, true to form, writes an exhaustive update on the challenges facing Iraq. After being embedded with U.S. soldiers in an outpost set up as part of President Bush’s troop surge, Anderson says violence has decreased – but the beleaguered country’s future is still in limbo. For those who don’t have time to read the lengthy piece, Capt. Jon Brooks, a U.S. officer interviewed in the story, sums up the problem nicely: “Until Iraqis work out the Sunni-Shia sectarian issues, they’re going to have a very tough time making meaningful or lasting progress.” Elsewhere, the mag profiles France’s Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala. The comedian, once considered a cross between Lenny Bruce and Sacha Baron Cohen, has become a vocal anti-Semite.

New York magazine lives up to its name, with some entertaining Big Apple pieces this week. The cover story is a gossipy read on the attempt by Brooke Astor’s 83-year-old son to convince the courts that his mother meant to transfer millions to him before she died. The magazine also has a colorful piece on Gerald Boyd, the former New York Times editor ousted over the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal. Jim Cramer, co-founder of TheStreet.com, writes an on-target piece criticizing the tenures of newly departed Wall Street bosses Stan O’Neal of Merrill Lynch and Chuck Prince of Citigroup.

Time‘s cover story alone makes the magazine worth picking up this week. Joe Klein interviews Dem front-runner Hillary Clinton, who admits that her Oct. 30 presidential debate performance could have been more “artful.” Accompanying sidebar stories further outline the challenges she faces, such as a South Carolina campaign by conservatives called stophernow.com and concerns among some of her party’s candidates about having her at the top of their ticket. Elsewhere, the newsweekly has what reads a bit like a dumbed-down primer on Citigroup and the unceremonious exit of Prince. But, that clunkiness aside, the piece offers a pretty decent overview of Citi’s ails.

This week’s Newsweek goes back in history, specifically to 1968 – the year, the mag says, that “made us who we are.” Why commemorate 1968, you ask? The magazine says we’re all still stuck in the ’60s – “hostages to a decade we define ourselves as for or against.” The news hook is that Barack Obama has promised that, unlike his political rivals, he’s not about the ’60s. Newsweek isn’t buying it. “Too many politicians have tried that before, only to be proved wrong, either by the boomer electorate or by their own lingering ’60s souls,” the mag writes. Besides its cover story, Newsweek has no less than eight other stories on the topic. More interesting is a piece on how Richard Mellon Scaife, the man behind the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Clinton claimed was out to destroy her husband, has pledged to write a generous check for the Clinton Foundation’s campaign against AIDs in Africa.